Southwest adding new Florida nonstop

The airline, already the largest at Albany International Airport, this morning said it would start operating nonstop service between Albany and Fort Lauderdale. The new daily nonstop begins flying Nov. 2, spokeswoman Christi Day said.

That would give Southwest, which uses Boeing 737s exclusively, 15 daily nonstops from Albany by late fall. The airline discontinued one of its seven daily nonstops to Baltimore for the summer, but airport CEO John O’Donnell expects that flight also will resume in the autumn.

Southwest which began service at Albany in May 2000, has grown steadily, adding nonstops to Chicago and Tampa to its initial nonstop destinations of Baltimore, Orlando and Las Vegas.

The newest flight would begin a day after American Eagle ends all service at Albany. Eagle and its predecessors had served Albany for just under 80 years, an eternity in the airline industry.

The one Southwest aircraft could more than make up for the loss of the Eagle flights. Eagle had 132 seats a day — 44 seats per flight — out of Albany. If Southwest uses its most common 737 configuration, the new flight will offer 137 seats.

Southwest has managed to hedge fuel prices successfully to keep its costs well below those of its competitors. It has begun using a new “optimization model” to identify places to reduce or add service.

But O’Donnell has been critical of Washington for not doing more to regulate the speculators who he blames for the spike in oil prices.

“Fuel hedging was designed for airlines and the transportation business, not for speculators,” he said. “This is not your typical commodity where the market will take care of itself.

“I don’t know if Congress is really paying attention to it as they should be,” O’Donnell added. “It’s jobs, the way America does business, it’s quality of life issues.”

Fort Lauderdale is the second most popular destination from Albany that doesn’t have nonstop service, O’Donnell said. Los Angeles International Airport is the most popular with one-stop service.

Fort Lauderdale also is a popular starting point for Carribean cruises.

“We’re very excited to be able to grow in Albany,” Day, the Southwest spokeswoman, said, adding that the airline was pricing introductory fares as low as $89 one way.

What a bunch of plutocrats – the inference is clear that the majority of respondents here are mostly concerned with how to get one’s (well pampered?) butt to Florida in the most direct fashion. Only one entry suggests to buckle down on this loss and put the emphasis on Albany as the “destination” of choice. It has to be said that if all Albany is doing is touting, “Look at us, we’ve got another outgoing flight”, one day the last person standing in line for it is going to turn around and be just that.

#12, if you’re traveling with children, why do you want to sit around and eat overpriced fast food at some crowded hub for a couple of hours until they deign to get a flight to your destination? This applies to working-class people too, not just “pampered butts”?

And frankly, when I moved to Albany 34 years ago, I told my young NYC friends who visited that the best thing about Albany is that it’s easy to get outta town to anywhere 😉

When an airline hedges its fuel costs, it speculates that the price of fuel will rise above a certain price. When an airline wants a fuel hedge, it does not go down to “Hedges R Us” and pay $3.99 for a fuel hedge. The airline enters into a contract that pays the airline if fuel goes above an agreed upon price. Just who does Mr. O’Donnell imagine is on the other side of that contract agreeing to pay the airline? It is not the state or federal government or even one of those evil oil companies. It is a speculator. If the government chases all those speculators out of the commodities market by regulation, who will be there to take the other side of a hedging contract for the airlines?